A post-Perween OPP soldiers on, digging sewers, but can’t fill the space she left behind

The Supreme Court’s hearing of a petition on her unsolved murder is due in a fortnight.

KARACHI: Everyone drags in a chair for the weekly meeting at the Orangi Pilot Project office even though there is one extra at the conglomeration of tables. No one sits in the brown chair.

The joint director, engineer Salim Alimuddin, hears the 15 men and women give updates on the sewer lines laid, the surveys completed, the files lost and found. The OPP does many things as a non-profit but its claim to fame is a spectacular model of grassroots sanitation. They help unplanned settlements lay their own sewage lines connected to the city’s mains in areas not serviced by the government. OPP helps survey, design and estimate costs but the people gather the money, buy the materials and do the work themselves. In its latest 134th quarterly report, for example, OPP states that since 1981, 69,000 homes have acquired latrines across Pakistan - and this doesn’t include Karachi. OPP’s model is so successful that it has been replicated across the country.

The late Perween Rahman caught in a light moment at her office in Orangi. Behind her is the brown chair which stays there to this day, six months after her murder. PHOTO: JUSTICE FOR PERWEEN RAHMAN PAGE ON FACEBOOK

As the meeting progresses, setbacks are discussed. Several staffers refer back to instructions or discussions with “madam”. Madam is Perween Rahman, the director of OPP, who was shot dead on March 13. Even though she is no longer in the room, she is still in the room.

“It is lonely,” admits Alimuddin, on whose shoulders fell the responsibility of steering OPP. With a helpless spread of his hands he adds, “Look, there is no one in this room.” He has no one to talk to, brainstorm with. Perween used to sit next to him. They were each other’s sounding board, friends, colleagues.



It is clear that Perween not just kept her hand on the rudder, she was the moral compass, the inspiration at OPP, starting several programmes such as the post-flooding rehabilitation, the school savings scheme. While everyone there is fully immersed and conversant with their respective programmes - sanitation, micro credit, education - Perween was the ‘figurehead’. As long-time education worker Salma Mir puts it: “She was the thinker.... wo 10 pe bhari, jaise kehte hain, a single personality who took everyone along.” Most of the others are there because of their skills as doers. Alimuddin himself keeps returning to describe himself as a technical person. Talk to him about drains, shuttering, roofing, any day. But now he finds himself dealing with donors, reports, presentations, administrative work, all matters Perween mainly managed.



The practicality of the team surfaces at their meeting when they go into mind-numbing details. The folks at Baldia’s UC4 Gabol Goth asked the OPP for help. But they just used its survey to assess how deep to excavate (4m), and over Eid enlisted a contractor to lay the sewage line instead of waiting for OPP. And then, the OPP team went to Noor Khan goth but it turned out that the government was already working there; the guides had confused it with Noor Mohammad goth. “Doubling ho gai,” remarked one of the OPP staffers.

Also, work has been completed on a 16-inch pipeline for which each house has scraped together Rs12,000. The list is endless. The work continues. Her work continues.

As for the murder case, OPP is not involved in it as such but Perween’s elder sister Aquila Ismail told The Express Tribune over the phone Monday that some of its board members are petitioners in their individual capacity (along with the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan). It is hard to believe the story that the murderer was one Qari Bilal of the Tehreek-e-Taliban, who was conveniently killed in a ‘shoot-out’, a day after her murder. What is more likely is that the water tanker mafia were behind the murder. It is a Rs490 million business each year - compare that with the water board’s Rs50 million budget. The extremists in the area take a cut from each tanker. The police have said this much as well. Additionally, there is the mystery of the second man on the motorcycle. If the attacker has been supposedly killed, where is this second man? The police have indicated Waziristan. But that is not good enough. The petition calls for a judicial commission to investigate. “We are hopeful,” says Ismail. “We’ll push. We are determined.”



The next hearing is expected in the second week of November. Ismail has set up a Facebook page called ‘JusticeForPerweenRahman’. Anyone can download and sign a petition to put their weight behind the cause.  Thousands have done so already.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 29^th, 2013.